The meaning of "Tollan"

[Julian Watrous]

Hi all,

My name is Julian Watrous, I'm a high school student in 11th grade from New
York City .  I have a strong interest in Mesoamerican history and culture,
so about a year I started taking Nahuatl classes at a Mexican cultural
center in Brooklyn called Mano a Mano, where I studied a dialect from
Puebla. Over the summer I went to Cuernavaca to learn Nahuatl from a
Nahuatl teacher at UNAM, Victorino Torres Nava, who was born and raised in
Cuentepec, Morelos, the last fully Nahua-speaking community in the state.

Anyway, for the entire school year I've been doing an independent research
project at my high school on the Toltecs. Specifically, I've studied
late-postclassic ideas about Tollan (the Toltec capital) and the Toltecs,
mostly from an Aztec, Yucatec Maya, and Highland Guatemalan point of view.

 Something that has often come up in my studies has been the meaning
of *tollan.
 *I think it's generally agreed upon that it comes from *tollin *and -tlan,
meaning "place of rushes."  And most sources I've read say that the word
*tollan*, due to the way rushes grow together, was a metaphor for any urban
place where  "people were as thick as rushes," and that as a result the
appellation Tollan was extended from Tula, Hidalgo to places like Cholula,
Tenochititlan and Teotihuacan.

In the Nahuatl dialect of Cuentepec, *tollan *now means something like "a
lot of people" or a "crowd."  I haven't read about the same meaning
occurring in any other Nahuatl dialects of today, or even in Classical
Nahuatl.  So that's really my question: does the word "tollan" still exist
in other Nahuatl dialects besides that of Cuentepec, and if so, does it
have the same meaning? Also, in Classical Nahuatl, can the word "tollan" be
directly linked to the metaphorical meaning mentioned above?

Thanks a lot and would really appreciate some insight,
Julian Watrous
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